


no peace that i've found so far

by Edoro



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Grief/Mourning, Haunting, Injury, Isolation, Loss, M/M, Past Character Death, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-27
Updated: 2019-09-27
Packaged: 2020-10-29 09:49:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20794667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edoro/pseuds/Edoro
Summary: Alain has always expected to die for Roland. He never thought he'd have to choose whether or not to live.(Offshoot AU of my main rewrite AU, just for fun.)





	no peace that i've found so far

Alain did not think. He simply shot. His aim was true as always, and the rangy goat fell at once, a steel ball in its heart. Having thus dispatched his prey, he did not hurry over, but made his way at a stately pace which did not aggravate his bad leg any more than the lumpy terrain did on its own.

It was closer than he’d thought, and smaller than he’d thought. A yearling, perhaps. Probably lost and looking for its mother. Alain spared a moment of sympathy for it, and gave it thanks for giving its life to feed him. Few of his kills were so large; he lived mostly off of fish from the river, birds and their eggs, and other small things, like the curious, glossy, rat-like animals that burrowed about beneath the ground of the scrubby plain. This one would give him plenty of meat to smoke, and he would make use of the hide as well.

Out here the land was buckled and rocky, the trees few and far between, and mostly small and gnarled things. None of them would serve well to hang the corpse from so that he could drain and gut and dress it. Alain hefted the corpse of the goat over his shoulder and began stumping back towards the cave.

“You know,” he said conversationally, “I wasn’t even out for meat. I meant to dig for roots. It’s a piece of fortune that you came along, billy-sai, though not so much for you. Though I do suppose I’ve killed you quicker than a cat might.” It was a piece of fortune, too, that he’d brought the sling rather than just his knife.

The rusty sound of his own voice made him feel uneasy. It had been a long time since he’d last spoken. More and more of late he found himself speaking only inside of his own head, or else unsure whether or not he’d said something out loud.  


The little goat said nothing. Its cooling bulk simply shifted back and forth on his shoulders in time with his lurching gait. Alain did not speak again until he got back to the cave.

There he had a simple stand set up, from which he could hang and drain and skin any corpse he cared to. He tied the goat up by its hind legs and efficiently stripped the hide off it, then put that aside for later. He slit open the belly and pulled free the entrails, talking in a low voice to himself as he did.

The kidneys were good for a wet chest. The liver was rich in iron and good to eat if one had just been wounded and lost blood, as was the heart. The viscera could be emptied out, dried, and used to make a tough casing for all manner of things. The bones of the spine and tail might be rendered down to make a healthful broth for soup, as might the hooves. The horns, small as they were, could be capped off and used for drinking, carrying liquids, or for blowing.

Such he had learned as a boy, not in Master Vannay’s classroom nor at Cort’s rough hands, but at his father’s side. Chris Johns had been an uneasy parent, and not known very well how to bond with his strange son. Still, he’d tried, and out of the distant soupy mess of childhood memories in which his father existed mostly as a perenially disappointed man with a loud voice and heavy hands, there were some Alain still recalled with great fondness: every autumn, his father had taken him hunting in the woods which surrounded Gilead.

There he had learned how to follow trail, how to sit and wait so silently that a deer might walk right by him and not even know he was there, how to make a pitfall or a snare or any number of other clever traps with rope and wood, and, of course, how to kill. And how to clean and dress his kill, and which parts were healthful, and which parts might be used for purposes other than the making of food.  


“I remember the face of my father,” Alain told the empty, dripping corpse of the billy goat as he began taking it apart at the joints. “It grows fainter every year, but I do see his face here in you.” Privately, Chris Johns had not been sure his odd, soft-mannered son would make a gunslinger - and to Alain, there was no such thing as a private thought. Yet here he was, perhaps the last of his kind, and Christopher’s bones were dust.

Small though it was, the goat offered him a wealth of meat. He stripped it down to the bones and then began the arduous process of turning that meat into strips which could be hung and smoked over the fire, and thus kept for winter. Most of it went that way, for he did not eat so much on his own that he could justify keeping much of it around. He carved himself off a sizeable chunk to cook with dinner, though, and collected bones to make a broth.

He lingered outside the cave until the light began to fade. Finally, he was done, all the meat cut and hung and drying in the billowing smoke of a well-kindled fire, all the bones either collected or thrown aside, the hide staked out and drying on its own frame. He could tarry no longer.  


Sighing, he went to wash the blood from his arms in the river, and went inside. There was one bit of work he could still do: dinner needed to be made. He fetched the cook pot and put it over the fire, then poured into it a measure of broth he’d made from the feet of birds. Into this he added a handful of greens and roots which he had gathered and dug, and then the goat meat, cut up into chunks.

It was not, perhaps, a tasteful soup, but it would nourish him well enough. Moreover, there’d be plenty tomorrow, and the day after too, like as not.  


His body ached. He needed to sit, and if he sat himself down on the ground, he knew it would be agony to get up. So, reluctantly, he took himself into the front chamber of the cave.

It was not yet full night, but the light from the fire only reached so far back. The front chamber was dim and full of leaping shadows. He moved carefully through it, tapping at the ground ahead with his staff so he didn’t run into any of the furniture. Two chairs and a table and naught else, and yet the number of times he’d managed to bark a toe - !  


Just as he’d eased himself down into a chair to sit and await dinner, the sound came. He ignored it.

Why, how did he even know he had heard it? After so long in such a wind-swept and lonely place, hearing only the rusty sawing calls of the seabirds and twitterings of the ground birds, a man’s mind might, out of desperation, invent any manner of noise.

It came again, unavoidably, relentlessly recognizable: a clotted, rattling cough.

Alain sighed again. “You needn’t do this,” he said reproachfully. “You might be of some use and send me a dream to show me a patch of spring onions or a bed of herbs or a rabbit warren instead of this grim rattling about.”

This time he spoke not to himself, but to the skull. It sat in a place of pride in the middle of the otherwise bare table, gleaming warmly in the flickering orange firelight. Not a scrap of hair or flesh remained. He’d cut the hair himself and shaved it down to the skin with the same razor he used on his own beard, and then let the maggots and beetles do their work to remove the flesh. Perhaps he could have helped that along himself, but he’d thought of cutting into that face he’d loved so dearly, and hadn’t been able to.

Though it was lovingly polished, it was not entirely whole. A crazed web of old, healed fracture lines radiated out from the edge of the left eyesocket, which was itself dented and cracked. The cheekbone on that side was as hilly and buckled as the foothills near which Alain lived. There, writ upon the very bone, was mute evidence of great violence endured in life, and yet the thing which had killed him hadn’t left a single sign at all -  


The cough came again, interspersed with desperate, whooping attempts at drawing in a breath. It would, Alain knew, continue this way all night unless he acknowledged it.

He pulled himself to his feet, went to the back chamber, and pulled the curtain. Back here it was very dark, but in that darkness he could see the shape of a body on the bed. A wet glimmer of reflected firelight disclosed a half-open eye.  


He waited. The shape took a choked, shallow, bubbling breath, then let it out in a series of explosive coughs. Like rapid gunfire - Alain found himself thinking of a time, ages past, when he’d used a machine gun to hole a series of oil tankers. Cuthbert had used his slingshot to fire big bangers into the spilling oil and set them all alight, and the greasy smoke and whopping stench had made them all three cough like that -

Another, desperate breath, this one shallower, reedier. More coughing. That eye, gleaming with the distant fire, rolling in its socket. Alain thought of the open distances of the Drop, the unbelievable vastness of the sea, which he’d never seen before that moment. The room was very small and very dark and very hot and it reeked of sickness, of vomit and blood and pus and death. In his mind, though, he was somewhere open, somewhere good, somewhere with the smell of late summer grass and hay and sea salt on the air.

The shape on the bed did not take another breath. It went still, and then all at once disappeared.  


Alain let the curtain fall and went back out the front of the cave. Dinner was done. It had started to boil over, in fact. Frothy waves of soup rolled down the sides of the cookpot to fall, hissing, into the fire. He grasped the handles - wrapped with leather strips for just this reason - and pulled it off, then carried it with him into the front chamber.

“I ought to bury you for good,” he told his dining companion as he waited for the soup to cool enough to eat. “Or smash you, perhaps.”  


The skull simply went on grinning at him, as if it had heard a fabulous joke. He supposed, in a way, it had. He would never do such a thing.

Everyone knew about ghosts. There was a staggering amount of information to be learned on the subject, most of it worthless, much of it contradictory. Alain supposed that he now knew more truth about ghosts than anyone in the whole dead world.

Ghosts, he had discovered, were a sort of echo. They might happen in a place of significance, or else be tied to some meaningful item. The body of the deceased was a powerful focus. That was why he’d kept the skull. He’d hoped perhaps to encounter a spirit which his touch allowed him to see and speak to, or to have dreams - but what he got, instead, was this: a death, repeated endlessly and without variation.

If he got rid of the skull, it might stop the visits, or might not. Dying was certainly the most momentous thing Cuthbert had done in this wretched place, and in life he’d had quite a flair for the dramatic. At first, when the loss was still raw, it had driven Alain to a frighteningly mindless fury. It had been a torment. Now it was a nuisance, but a familiar one, and in its own queer way, reassuring.  


He ate. His food was not flavorful, and he was not particulary hungry, but he ate. It was Cuthbert who’d always had a taste for - well - taste. As soon as they’d established themselves, he’d gone out hunting for flavorful and aromatic herbs to use in their cooking and their soap. After he was gone, Alain had used those stores more out of habit than anything else, but once he’d exhausted them, he’d felt no urge to go replace them.

When he was done eating, he went into the back chamber. Darkness lay like a heavy velvet curtain over everything. It was very silent, save for the distant crackling of the fire, and it smelled mostly of smoke and his own body. His bed was very wide and very empty. He lay awake, staring blindly at the rough rock ceiling, until eventually he slept.

\---

he stands naked in the bowl of bones, splinters in his feet and dust in his nose, his mouth, his eyes, caking the inside of his throat all the way down to his stomach, dust all inside of him, no water to be found, nothing good or kind or true left in him

he stands naked in the bowl of bones and he turns to look and there in front of him is the endless lapping hungry sea, reaching out with a hundred hundred clacking claws and buzzing mandibles, washing up over the beach and then retreating leaving nothing but bare sand and skeletons stripped of every scrap of flesh

he stands naked in the bowl of bones and he turns to look and there behind him the mountains rear up to bite the sky and all is glowing red, red, red, oh woe oh Discordia oh the unbearable light of that evil thing’s forge pulsing and glowing like the beat of a monstrous diseased heart

he takes a step and stumbles and reaches out to catch himself and pain licks up bright and hot and burns its way up his arm and into his throat and his mouth and -

\---

Alain woke with the sound of his own screaming ringing in the air around him. He sat up, panting, staring wild-eyed around the dark room. It was too early as yet for the sun to be up, too early for any mote of light to filter through, but colors swam at the edges of his vision. The darkness, so familiar, was overwhelming. It made him think of -  


_ under the mountain, the trestle collapsing, the boy falling, his white face, his white hands, his last whispered words - _

suffocating, drowning, being buried alive. All at once he could not stand another second. He rose, blundering his way out of bed and towards the curtained door which would take him to the outer portion of the cave and then outside into the night air.

One step, then another, and then although he knew the inside of this cave like the inside of his own head, his reaching hands felt hard rock rather than the doorway, and he could not remember which way he needed to go to find the way out. Panic rose into his throat, hot and sour. He groped along the wall, figuring that he would have to come around either to the door or to the bed, and know he had to go back the other way, and then abruptly, his left leg gave out beneath him.

It didn’t hurt. One moment the delicate arrangement of muscles and bones and tendons held his weight, and then the next it did not. He staggered, coming down hard on his right foot, and that  _ did _ hurt because that put all of his weight onto a knee that was mostly splinters and scar tissue and a hip that ground stiffly in its socket, and then he fell.

Just barely, he managed to keep himself from falling flat on his face. Instead he sat heavily down, then tipped backwards. The impact of his head against the floor of the cave sent stars bursting in his vision, but those were shorty eclipsed by the white-hot howling from his hip.

When he attempted to sit up, the long bone of his thigh shifted under his skin in a way that was as nauseating as it was painful. He raised a twitching hand and slid it hesitantly down his body to probe at the area. The end of his femur made a bulge in the inside of his thigh, near his groin. Touching it, even gently, hurt, but worse than the pain was the crawling sense of  _ wrongness _ , of some fundamental distortion in the way his body was meant to be.

Whimpering, he lay back, and for a time he knew - thought - felt nothing. For a time, he was elsewhere. Cast free of its moorings, his mind flew down the beach until it found a familiar soul - Roland, whose pain he’d dreamt. Roland, hurt and shaking in the grip of a growing fever. Roland, who surely could not still be alive, who surely would not live much longer, who Alain desperately reached for and could not help.

He rode with Roland as Roland sought safety, saw to his wounds, slept, and woke again, feverish and hurt. He stayed with Roland all throughout that first terrible day’s journey, as his thirst grew and the infection in his flesh spread. When at last Roland fell asleep again, though, his mind was called back to his own body.

When he came back to himself, it was late in the day. Dim light came through from the front of the cave, just enough to turn the bedroom into a murky sea of shadows. The pain had settled into a hot, ugly throb, but Alain knew that as soon as he moved it would dig its claws in.

With great effort, he managed to lever himself up into a sitting position and then drag himself - slowly and painfully - around until he could lean his back against the wall of the cave. Breath hissing through his clenched teeth, he leaned his head back against the cool stone and waited for the waves of pain to subside.

How he was to work his own hip back into the socket, he didn’t know, but he would have to do it himself. There was no one else. He would do it himself or he would lay here in agony until he died of thirst.

Loneliness crashed down upon him. For a moment he could barely breathe. In that instant he wanted someone, anyone - he wanted Cuthbert, he wanted Roland, he wanted his long-dead mother, even his father. Never in his life had he been so singularly isolated. Never had he been so afraid.

A sob caught in his throat. He put his hands to his face, willing back the slow seep of frustrated tears. Right then, if he’d had a gun to hand, he might have simply put a bullet in his own skull and ended the whole sorry charade then and there.

He did not, though, and so once the tears had passed - leaving him wrung out and raw - he set to working his femur back into the socket of his hip. It was monstrously painful, but he knew how to block off the sensations of his body while still leaving his mind in control. Faintness threatened to overtake him many times during the process, but it was only once he’d finished that he let himself fall back out of awareness.

\---

“A fine day, is it not?” Alain’s voice emerged from his throat less rusty than usual. He had been speaking more of late, to himself and to the skull. He sat atop the hill in which their home was dug, the skull on his thigh, one hand atop it. The curve of it fit so comfortably into his hand, though the smoothness of polished bone was only ever a cold comfort at best. He would have preferred warm and living flesh.

There was no response save the gentle, warm breeze that tugged at his hair and swirled with the scent of summer grass and sea air. The whole world stretched out around Alain, it seemed, with him sitting cupped in its palm. Such a profound sense of peace had not come to him in a long time.

Perhaps it was a sign. He knew, though, how easy it was to read signs into anything, and to make them say whatever one wished the truth to be. He would not let himself fall prey to that.

“I suppose,” he said softly, “that I know what I must do. Certainly, I know what you would do. But must I stay beholden to your good opinion when you’ve gone and left me?” He caressed the skull, slipping his fingers over the familiar bumps and dips of it, over the buckled area of cracked bone around the left eye socket. “What use would I be to him, anyway, old and crippled as I am?”

Plenty use. He knew that. His use was in his mind, and though perhaps that had rusted somewhat during his years of isolation, it could be sanded clean and sharpened up once more.  


What he truly feared was the look on Roland’s face when he arrived and, expecting to see the both of them, was met only by Alain and by Cuthbert’s grave. He had long since made peace with the uneasy glut of feeling between Roland and Cuthbert, never acknowledged or quite acted upon, and with his own position as secondary to it, to both of them. There were parts of Cuthbert he’d had that Roland never had, and now never would, and he had not been greedy enough or foolish enough not to content himself with that. But still, to see Roland’s grief - Roland’s disappointment - to know that both of them would rather it be Bert here alone, and Alain long since gone to the clearing - he did not think he could bear it.

“I have served him well, have I not? Served him well and long. Do I not deserve my rest? Might I not come visit you in the clearing, finally, and be rid of this ungainly flesh?” He stroked the skull one more time, and picked up the gun. “He won’t be alone. If he would be alone, I wouldn’t, but he won’t be.”

For a time, he simply sat with it in his lap, looking at and touching it, making himself familiar all over again with every part of it. It was not his gun, though it was near as dear to him as his own. This one had been made for a slimmer hand, a lighter frame. Neither of the two together were as heavy as either of his own guns. Those hands had worn the handle differently than his hands had worn his own.

“If I did come to you,” he asked, as he took the gun in hand and raised it up, “and told you what I had done and how I had come to be there, would you forgive me?”  


The skull said nothing.

He put the barrel of the gun in his mouth. It rested on his tongue, heavy and cold. He closed his lips around it, closed his eyes, and thought of Cuthbert’s fingers in his mouth, warm on his tongue, calloused and tasting of black powder, of metal, of sweat, of flesh. With all the power of his mind he conjured up the image of Cuthbert sitting behind him, wrapped around him, holding the gun for him, crooning into his ear to come now, come see him, come be with him.  


Their fingers on the trigger together - the bullet would blow through him into Cuthbert - they would die together like they should have, like it was supposed to have been, like he’d always wanted it to be - they’d lie together in the soft grass of the clearing and everything would be beautiful and nothing would hurt -

_ You’ve been alone for so long,  _ whispered the voice that was not truly Cuthbert’s.  _ You’ve given so much. Come rest. I miss you. _

He sat that way for a long time until he came to a decision.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a few scattered ideas for this fic, but not enough for a whole narrative. I intend to write and publish more, but it's also at a place where I feel it stands on its own, so here you go. Watch this space.


End file.
